23/06/2009 Note: Time series Data Cube tables. Series is being re-issued. The new series includes new tables, amended tables and changes to the file naming conventions enabling greater flexibility for the inclusion of further tables at a later date. Amendments affect all STUDENTS tables, the Apparent Retention Rates and Student Participation Rates tables. Individually, the data amendments are minor, with no statistically significant effect on trends or annual movements.07/05/2009 Note: Schools, Australia, 2008 has re-issued their PDF and data cubes numbers 1-23. Data cubes 13, 20, 21 and 22 have data changes and some other data cubes have minor cosmetic changes.

NOTES

ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION

The statistics in this publication relate to government and non-government schools, students and school staff, and were collected through the non-finance National Schools Statistics Collection (NSSC), which was established through the work of the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA). For more detailed information about the structure and scope of the NSSC refer to the Glossary.

The Apparent Progression Rate (APR) is included here for the first time. This measure shows the apparent proportion of students in a particular age/grade in 2007 that progress to the next grade in 2008. The principal difference between this measure and the other rates in this publication is the exclusion of students whose age places them outside the appropriate age/grade cohort, i.e. those students who may have returned to schooling after having left.

This rate plus the expanded School Participation Rates (SPR) and the Apparent Continuation Rates (ACR) form the bulk of the new range of secondary participation measures originally proposed in the research paper Deriving Measures of Engagement in Secondary Education from the National Schools Statistics Collection (Cat.no. 1351.0.55.016) published in December 2006.

The new measures provide additional views of school participation, and are based around single year-to-year movements. Measures that have been previously used, such as apparent retention rates, generally measure change over a longer period of time (two to five years). When the period of analysis is longer, student transitions, such as migration across state borders or between school systems, death or re-entry to the school system, are likely to have a greater effect on calculations. This new approach minimises the effect of errors associated with longer term measures.

A more extensive range of statistical products from this collection will be loaded to the ABS web site at <URL:http//www.abs.gov.au>, as they become available.

USAGE

Where figures have been rounded, discrepancies may occur between sums of the component items and totals.

INQUIRIES

For further information about these and related statistics, contact the National Information and Referral Service on 1300 135 070 or Leo Stinson on Canberra (02) 6252 7793.

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